Captains and the Kings Quotes

“Republics never survive, for their people do not like freedom but prefer to be led and guided and flattered and seduced into slavery by a benevolent, or not so, benevolent despot. They want to worship Caesar. So, American republicanism will inevitably die and become a democracy, and then decline, as Aristotle said into a despotism.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings: The Story of an American Dynasty

“Mankind adores its betrayers, and murders its saviors.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“Life is a comedy for the man who thinks, a tragedy for the man who feels.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you.
~Taylor Caldwell”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captain and the Kings

“who do you honestly believe rules any nation? The apparent rulers, or the real ones behind the scenes who manipulate a nation’s finances for their own benefit? Mr. Lincoln is as helpless as you and I. He can only, unfortunate man, give his people slogans, and slogans, it would appear, are what the people want. I have yet to hear of a nation that ever rejected a war.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“Bernadette never learned that a restrained voice meant dignity and control of strong feeling or good manners, especially in women. She thought such a voice was servile, fit only for servants, and that the possessor was timid, humble, inferior, and worthy only of abuse and peremptory correction.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“When you are young you believe the world is all yours, glorious and exhilarating and fascinating and full of promise and trumpets and drums and marches and new worlds,” said Charles. “We don’t ask ourselves what we are living for then. We know. But we forget, later, or it all seems a foolish dream.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“People—everybody—take themselves too seriously. Each generation thinks it will save the world, make a new Utopia, a new order. It ends up in the same Dismal Swamp.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“Americans suspect too much intellect,” he would say. “They prefer a glittering clown.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“We are one nation, and one nation we will remain until we are destroyed by our Vandals from within.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“A politician, as we know, who serves the people, really serves them out of conviction and idealism, is eventually despised by them as a naïve imbecile. But a scoundrel of color, who can invent a few deadly aphorisms of his own, and can laugh and twinkle and joke, gets their adoration, and even if he is later exposed for what he is—a thief, a timeserver, a liar—the public becomes hysterical at the 'attacks' on him. In fact, the public will attack the outraged attackers of their darling.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings: The Story of an American Dynasty

“should have no churches and no religions.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“Hypocrisy should not be wholly detested. Without it we should have no civilization, nor could men live together for a single hour without killing each other. Other words for it are gentility and tolerance and regard for neighbor, and self-restraint and self-discipline. I might even go so far as to say that without it we”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“Cromwellian: Riches are not to be despised, and if scruples are strangled in the manner of getting them it should be denounced openly and publicly mourned. Ah,”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“It is not agree able to me to see these people, in this room, happy that men are dying and the earth destroyed so that they can be prosperous!”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“you honestly believe rules any nation? The apparent rulers, or the real ones behind the scenes who manipulate a nation’s finances for their own benefit? Mr.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“she had always considered him enigmatic and beyond her simple comprehension, now she felt as if he were not of flesh or blood and did not possess any of the sentiments of men or any of their concerns, and she was almost as deeply frightened then as ever she had been in her suffering life.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“Then,” said Joseph, “you also know, as the Renaissance Italians knew that politics and moral ethics never mix. Politics and ethics are a contradiction in terms. An honest politician is either a hypocrite—or he is doomed.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“Mr. Lincoln too much, though I confess to despising him. He said that America will never be conquered from without but by the Vandals within. I fear he is only too right.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“Then he thought: But the “Captains and the Kings” haven’t “departed” at all! They were stronger than ever, since Rory Armagh’s assassination. They would continue to grow in strength, until they had the whole silly world, the whole credulous world, the whole ingenuous world, in their hands. Anyone who would challenge them, attempt to expose them, show them unconcealed and naked, would be murdered, laughed at, called mad, or ignored, or denounced as a fantasy-weaver.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“So long as we hold hatred for anyone,” said Mr. Chisholm, marveling at his new thoughts, “we are not men at all. We are beasts. It is against the dignity of men that we should hate. It is against the ordinances of God.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“Only in love is there a real springtime, she would sadly reflect. Only love makes us immortal and immune to living; only in love is there youth and hope. Without it, we are blasted trees in an ashy forest where nothing moves or has a significant being, and where there is no sunset and no rising of the sun, but only a smoky twilight.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“For, after all, what is sin? It is common sense. It is reality. In truth, it is the only reality in the world, and everything else is confusion, lies, hypocrisy, sentimentality, pietistic falsehood and delusion. I suggest that you once came to this conclusion, yourself.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“mother,”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“intelligent, an attribute Joseph was later”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“The emotions of women were of no interest to him, and if they displayed them in his presence he was bored and vexed, as one is annoyed by an insistent and not exceedingly intelligent child, or a pampered pet. He found no intellectual satisfaction in conversing with women”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“Profits. Joe, if you want to use just one word”—and Mr. Healey wagged a huge finger at Joseph—“to describe wars and the making of wars, it’s profits. Nothing else. Profits.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“Forests, hills, mountains, rivers, and green streams had no protection in the face of rapacity.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings

“money came from human misery and death and despair, as always it does.”
― Taylor Caldwell, Captains and the Kings